Europe Puts Social Programs on Chopping Block to Appease Trump on NATO Funding

At last week’s NATO summit, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that his country would be buying a dozen F-35A fighter jets from the U.S., each one capable of carrying a payload of tactical nuclear weapons. It marks the first time since shortly after the end of the Cold War that U.S. nuclear weapons capable of being dropped from aircraft are to be stationed in the U.K.

At the NATO summit, a triumphant Trump — who has made skepticism about NATO and, at best, ambivalence about its collective defense provisions centerpieces of his emergent political ideology over the decades – engaged in one of the most brazen displays of shakedown politics in modern history. In exchange for maintaining U.S. security commitments, the U.S. president demanded, in the weeks leading up to the summit, that NATO members move toward spending an astounding 5 percent of their GDP on defense and security, more than doubling what most NATO members, with the exception of Poland and the Baltic States, currently spend.

Leaders of the NATO member countries competed with each other over who could fawn the most in efforts to gain Trump’s favor, and ultimately almost all of them fell into line, agreeing to huge defense spending hikes over the coming decade. Their goal is that by 2035 they will be spending at least 3.5 percent of their respective GDPs on core military spending, and another 1.5 percent on security and miscellaneous other expenditures designed to harden economies and infrastructure against cyberattacks, people trafficking, and additional risks and perceived risks to NATO economies.

The one exception was Spain, the socialist government of which balked at the increased spending commitment and received an opt-out, to the chagrin of Trump, who launched a blitz of social media posts against the Spanish government and declared that, in consequence, Spain would have to pay twice as much in tariffs in any future trade deal with the U.S. (This seemingly ignores the fact that Spain is a part of the EU and can’t be treated differently from other bloc members in any negotiated agreement.)

NATO leader Mark Rutte, ex-head of the Dutch government, lauded Trump as “Daddy,” and praised to the rafters his decision to pre-emptively attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. Photos showed him laughing and smiling at every Trump aside, like a courtier at the Sun King’s court, a display of quite astounding sycophancy. Other NATO leaders followed suit. Cumulatively, The Guardian wrote, it was an “orchestrated grovel,” the likes of which hadn’t previously been seen in U.S. relations with its allies. This wasn’t a conference of equals; rather it was a spectacle in which the U.S.’s strongman demanded — and received — the sort of accolades and over-the-top tributes that Soviet general secretaries used to demand from satellite state leaders in Eastern Europe, or that emperors of old required of conquered vassals.

Trump’s agenda was pretty straightforward: if Europe and Canada wanted the security guarantees that the U.S. has provided since World War II, then they would have to pay through the nose for the privilege. This would be manifested through massively increasing military spending, reducing domestic safety net spending, and channeling hundreds of billions of dollars toward U.S. arms manufacturers.

The F-35A fighter jets alone will cost the British government over 1 billion pounds, and, once refueling planes, which the jets will need to operate far from U.K. shores, and other supportive infrastructure are factored in, that cost will rise still further. That’s money going straight to Lockheed Martin.

This same week, the U.K. government has been pushing for massive reductions to social safety-net payments for hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities — and has, in consequence, faced a huge rebellion from within its own Labour Party ranks. And that follows on from an ill-fated effort last year to curtail an energy assistance program intended to ensure that Brits, especially pensioners, could keep their heating on during the cold winter months.

Similar trade-offs will, in coming years, be felt throughout NATO. Unlike the U.S., which for years has been able to tap international lenders’ willingness to fund an American debt spree, most other NATO members simply do not have the market clout — or under the rules that bind the EU together, the legal right — to borrow on such a massive scale. As a result, much of the increase in military spending will come out of existing social programs, foreign aid commitments, and even pension and health care systems. Germany, for example, is planning to nearly double its military spending over the next five years, leaving a hole of tens of billions of euros in its budget. Denmark has created an “acceleration fund” that will channel an additional $7 billion into military spending over the coming two years, representing roughly 1.5 percent of its GDP. France, which has long battled with its own budget woes, will likely have to introduce a combination of tax hikes and social spending cuts to fund its military build-up. Poland has asked the European Commission to shift nearly $7 billion in green projects expenditures allotted to Poland into military spending instead. The continental commitments to increased military spending likely will result in a further erosion of the decades-old European social compact.

Caught between Putin’s expansionist and imperialistic impulses — as demonstrated so brutally in Ukraine and with the increasingly militarist rhetoric coming out of the Kremlin — and Trump’s transactional, America First foreign policy, Europe’s leaders have decided to embrace the sort of massive ramp-up in military spending that so often serves as the prelude to war. No one wants to be caught wrongfooted should Putin order his military to breach NATO borders on the East, or NATO airspace elsewhere in Europe. No one wants to be the country that Trump steps back from defending — as he has, in the past explicitly said he would do, announcing he would encourage Putin’s forces to “do whatever the hell they want” — because they aren’t meeting the military spending goals that he has laid out. And thus, NATO’s member states have ratcheted up military expenditures to a degree that, even a couple of months ago, would have seemed to be both implausible and dangerously destructive toward Europe and Canada’s social compacts.

Not all of that money now earmarked for military spending will flow to U.S. defense contractors; but given the U.S.’s pre-eminence in the field of high-tech weaponry, it’s a sure bet that, at least in the short term, while Europe grapples with how to diversify away from an unpredictable and even predatory U.S., an awful lot of it will.

All of this stands to benefit the military-industrial complex mightily. The losers, of course, will be those who rely on the social safety net programs that get pushed aside in the rush to find funds to boost military spending. But it won’t happen without resistance: Stamer’s announcement immediately triggered opposition from anti-nuclear groups. During the last years of the Cold War, groups such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament engaged in civil disobedience campaigns to pressure the government to remove nuclear weapons from the Greenham Common air base. Now, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and other peace groups have once again begun mobilizing for rallies, as early as this weekend, at the Royal Air Force bases slated to host the planes and weapons.

It is, of course, early days. But there are signs that European populaces won’t uncritically rally around Trump’s demand for wholesale, breakneck rearmament. Of course, Europe and Canada do need to work out ways to protect their interests in the face of U.S. retrenchment. But what Trump is demanding is something entirely different; he is insisting on a form of tribute imposed via mandated weapons purchases — and while Europe’s leaders fawn, it’s not at all clear that their populaces will back them up.